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Created September 16, 2014 20:00
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Life After WDI June Closure
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life_after_wdi.md

Life After WDI

Learning Objectives

  • Understand and explain how to be a great developer

Outline

  • Stay hungry... there's always:
    • more to learn
    • a better way to do what you're trying to do
    • entire worlds / paradigms in programming that you've probably never heard of, let alone understand
  • Become Mediocre: That is, surround yourself with better developers.
    • Work
      • Work will be one way to do this for many of you, but you may not be so lucky, and at some point, you may be the best developer at your company (crazy, right?)
    • Non-work Peers
      • Attend meetups, conferences,
    • Find a mentor
      • The good news is that there are lots of people who know a lot about programming, and may be willing to mentor you.
      • Finding a mentor isn't easy, but some things might help:
        • work in the open
          • people giving feedback on a github commit is valuable, and could lead to longer discussions on code
          • people are more willing to help those who help others
        • serve as a mentor for others
          • many of you are fortunate to have some structured ways in which you'll be helping others, for those of you who don't, seek out organizations devoted to helping people
            • they often have training / resources
          • teaching is a fantastic way to improve your skills
          • people are more willing to help those who help others
  • Followup on Hari's accountabilibuddy: set measurable, achievable goals for yourself.
    • Walk through leveling up as a developer, and discuss why each item is important
    • Learn a variety of programming paradigms:
    • Experience the ins and outs of programming for different platforms:
    • Enhance your understanding of the building blocks that we use as developers:
    • Enlighten yourself with koans, katas, and the wisdom of ages:
    • Program in the open:
    • Learn by teaching others:
  • Read a book
  • Read source code (i.e. for rails, backbone, underscore, or anything that you use).
  • Every bug you fix is a level up, but you have to understand why it happened. (Root cause analysis)
  • Listen to podcasts (railscasts, Ruby Rogues, etc)
  • Understand that all programming happens in a domain. Learn the domain you're working in well, and own it.
  • Take responsibility for the code that you write. Be professional.
  • Focus on quality.

Some Recommendations:

  • Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (Sandi Metz)
  • Confident Ruby (by Avdi Grimm)
  • Agile Web Development with Rails (reference)
  • RailsCasts
  • RubyTapas
  • RubyWeekly
  • RubyRogues
  • SuperheroJS
  • EloquentJS
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